You are taught that if you stop participating in the group’s way of life, your hopes for happiness, success, and peace will also end. The group tells you that if you go against the norm, you will not find happiness, peace, or success. So you buy into the illusion the group offers, believing that there is no other way. You carefully weave and contour the illusion into one you can live with for now. But my friend, regardless of how you choose to weave, contour, and experience the illusion, it is still an illusion.
I never expected my favorite Professor to hold papers and opinions that were illegal of Party values, but yet it spoke directly from a truth I felt resonate intrinsically within side of me. The conceivable idea that my life is just a resource of the state to send off to war unnerved and angered me, but at the same time my sense of patriotism, my nationalism, encouraged that I should go willingly.
After all, I owe my security and opportunity to education to the state. In fact, I owe everything to the state. And again, I also feel that guilt rise too, the guilt that I am acting selfish, only out of my own interests, than what the state is clearly acting out of the interests of millions. Yet, oh yet! I still feel deceived, even used, that I could be collected and shipped out so easily, to a war in an entire different star system. I assumed it was my own personal morals that I am breaking ultimately in going. But now, I don’t know anymore. And beyond this, what insight or revelation did it really bring that mattered to me? I am still to join the military, and I am still to leave and fight.
In fact, why should I cloud my mind with even more discourse at such a crucial hour? I have always trusted the Party, they have always done me good. I must trust their collective agreement over my selfish whims. I must be strong. But still, out of longing curiosity, I ask Mr. Martin, “What would you possibly suggest me to do, sir?”
“You can’t run from the government sadly. We live in a time where you are always monitored, known. But you can become a force of change. That is what you are destined to do Peter. That is what I would have sent you off with my best luck if things were different,” he pauses, “Don’t let this war destroy you.”
“Surely I will die.”
“Peter,” Mr. Martin squares his shoulders directly parallel with mine, forcing me to make eye contact with him, “What I speak of goes far deeper than your physical being. First, you must believe, fight for, your right to live and make it through this war. But more so, don’t let this war destroy you. Who you are,” he points at my heart, “don’t let that ever happen. If you die, die as who you are. The greatest loss will be if the war takes that away. Not what you are, a bag of flesh and bones that will die eventually, but who you are. Remember that Peter. I will pray, I will beg any and all of the celestial beings out there to bring you home safely. May all of good fate be with you.”
With that I leave, giving my final farewells. I leave down my usual hallway of my favorite part of college, for the last time.
I meet Isaac at the main entrance, his belongings all slumped around him. He is smoking an ancient and tapping a leg fast. “Hey.”
“Wanna do the route one last time?”
“Of course. May be the last.”
We get into my mustang and leave onto the route.
“I’ll miss you Wang-Stang,” says Isaac, breaking the silence. It returns quickly, heavy like our minds.
We pass through downtown. It’s late morning so none of the bars are open, and most of the town is empty. We continue onwards through the state park.
“Let’s stop at that one place we did last time,” says Isaac.
We pull over at the turnoff, and walk to the meadow.
“Sure is beautiful,” says Isaac.
“Yeah, I’ll miss it, along with all the other little things around here.”
“It’s a good little town.”
We sit down in the soft tall grass, taking in the last of our freedom before we are shipped off to a new world. But I can’t enjoy it, it’s like I am already on a starship leaving. A convict eating his last meal.
“Peter, we gotta take care of each other when we’re out there, bud,” he looks up at the sky, at the invisible stars hidden under the bright day.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t we?”
“I know, I’m just saying. You’re all I got. All I got out there. You’re my brother.”
I look at Isaac. “Same.” I can’t imagine losing him.
We leave after a while to the Recruitment Center in the town over. It’s packed with a line of other young men. Eventually we make it through the doors to a crowded room filled with papers all over the ground.
“SS please,” says a man behind a desk. I hand him my card and he gives me a number. Next, Isaac and I are called into a group with other people to enter a room.
“You from NCS too?” says Isaac to a guy next to us.
He lowers a red notebook he was writing in and turns. “Yeah, Vance is my name.”
“Isaac,” he nudges me, “and this is Peter. We dormed together.”
“Listen up!” The room quiets as an officer walks in. “We have a ton of job openings in the Marines. Sure we still need some in the Army, but our Marine Core is practically nonexistent as it hasn’t been used for half a century. I am correct to say that most of you are students from North Carolina State?”
There’s some muttering of agreement.
“Well then, if you sign up in the Marines, you can go in together, as a school outfit.”
Many hands go up.
“What do the Marines do?” says Vance.
“First to fight.”
All hands go down.
“Let me be clear,” says the officer. “The military has a huge request for additional Marines. Many of you may and try to hold onto luck for something else, don’t count on it. You’ll probably be sent into the Marine Core anyway. But it will be random, with no one you know. I am giving you an option to fight with fellow faces you have met over the years.”
I look at Isaac. We stand up with some others, including Vance, and go to the front table by the officer. I sign my name on the contract oath. Before my signature is the ink of hundreds of others names. But they’re all alien to me. Even my own name. I glance back at the paper one last time as I lower the pen. I don’t remember putting my name there. On that sheet is me, but it’s a different Peter now. A Peter I am quickly forgetting. We get back in my car and leave, leave our town, leave our lives.
V
Isaac hands the paper back to me, and I read what he wrote, the last word being Karma.
Kenneled anger recreates more anger,
Now my turn.
And no greater emotion resonates,
I hand the paper back to him.
“Now entering Dolus system,” announces the intercom. Red lights flash and emergency sirens blare in the ship corridors.
“So this is it,” says Isaac.
This is it. Shit, this is it. This is where I discover what I am made of. What I can do to help change the course of the war, and what is left of myself that I can hold onto. The hardest thing to come to resolution with was that dilemma of my pacifism verses fighting for the greater good.
We march to our first day of combat training where our Drill Instructor already waits. My torn apart conciseness refuses to leave me alone. You can’t do this Peter, violence is wrong. I’ve never hated anyone in my life, or ever really been in a fight. Actually, the only fight I guess I had ever been in before basic was back in elementary. A sixth grader wouldn’t stop throwing leaves at me and I had recently learned the word, fuck. So I told him off with the former, and sure enough, I got my ass kicked, badly.